Dave Kearns

Had an earthquake just after 8 PM last night, 5.6 on the richter scale, the biggest in this area since the Loma Prieta (a.k.a., the “world series quake”) quake in 1989. There was little damage from this one, though, which had an epicenter near Alum Rock, about 11.5 miles due east of here.

We’d just finished dinner, I was starting the dishwasher and Anne Mary was wiping down the table. But the table started vibrating, and the kitchen counter started jumping! It lasted 25-30 seconds – fairly long for a mid-level quake – and was felt all over the area, from Monterey to Marin.

There were numerous small aftershocks for the next few hours, just enough to rock me to sleep.

I guess, after 6 years, we’re real Californians now.

The power went out this morning at 8:15, just as I was writing a post to the Virtual Quill. Since it was, at least in theory, timely I needed to find a place that would let me connect to transfer it (I’ve recently switched to using the laptop all the time, so it just meant ‘hibernating’ it until I found a hotspot). We do have municipal wifi here in Sunnyvale, and I can usually get a connection from the patio behind the house, but no luck today. Since the WAP is only a half block away, I guess it lost power too. So into the car and drive up to the local Starbuck’s (I have a Hotspot account for airports and days like today). Lot’s of people milling about outside, no lights on inside – don’t even stop there! I hear that a 75′ tree has toppled over about half a mile away – guess it took the power lines with it! So I head south on El Camino Real and find a Starbucks with power (and a T-mobile store next door!) where I’m sitting right now. There are times I do love the 21st century!

…everyone else is getting younger. I didn’t appreciate reading in this morning’s newspaper that an “elderly” man’s body had been discovered south of San Jose. He was 61! Today is my 62nd birthday – how depressed did that make me feel?

I note that now the on-line version of the headline has been changed to “Deputies call death of San Jose man in Morgan Hill suspicious” certainly a better (from my perspective, if not the victim’s), more neutral news headline. I wonder if it was the editor, or the reporter who considered 61 to be “elderly”?

This is on the heals of another news story from a few weeks ago where two firefighters were killed trying to rescue a couple from a burning house. The 67-year-old man and his 61-year-old wife were described as “an elderly couple” both in the paper and on the TV news for a couple of days before a correction was made.

I can handle “senior citizen” and wince (but suffer through) at “golden ager” but if we call sixty-year-olds “elderly,” wha’s left to characterize the 85 year old?

Global Warming itself is not a myth: the earth is getting warmer, our climate is changing. Some of the pressures bringing about that change are human-created carbon emissions. But, contrary to what Pacific Gas & Electric would have you believe, we cannot stop global warming! Still, the energy company insists on putting a tag line on it’s TV ads for energy conservation claiming (or, in some cases, alluding to) the consumer’s ability to do just that.

Reducing carbon emissions is a good thing to do. So is conserving energy. But even if we stopped all carbon emissions today, all over the world, climate change would still come.

History shows that those organisms which can survive global climate change are those which are the most adaptable. But to be considered “adaptable,” we’re going to have to either plan for mass migrations as the climate changes, or work to keep our microclimates livable through the use of energy-efficient, low-carbon-emitting changes to our way of life – adding heat or cooling, irrigation, flood-control, and other non-natural impediments to nature. Science fiction talks about humans going to other planets and “terraforming” them – “…deliberately modifying its atmosphere, temperature, or ecology to be similar to those of Earth in order to make it habitable by humans” – but we’re going to have to perfect ways of terraforming the changed Earth first!

UPDATE: I’ve just come across an excellent essay by physicist Freeman Dyson (the inventor of the Dyson Sphere) on this issue. Be sure to read thru to the end where he also tells how he almost set back the course of biology a generation!

OmiGod! It rained today here in the bay area – first time there’s ever been measurable rain in San Jose on July 18th. It’s cleared out now, and the sun is back in the sky where it belongs, but – for just a little while there – I’d thought that I was back on the east coast.